Hacktoberfest

Last October I participated in #Hacktoberfest, sponsored by DigitalOcean and Github. It’s a “celebration” to promote open source activity, and basically you just need to submit 5 pull requests to any github repository, and they give away swag to anyone who completes the activity. Microsoft held a [counterpart celebration] where they only require you to submit 1 pull request to any Microsoft repository.

I’ve always wanted to start participating in Open Source, but it’s a bit difficult to find a good place to contribute (other than logging issues of course). So when I heard about this activity, I thought “Why not?” Anyway, I’m not ashamed to admit 4 out of my 5 PRs were to small/minor projects, some of them seemingly created specifically to help farm Hacktoberfest PRs lol. I did manage to get one pull request accepted for my current favorite editor, VSCode! So that’s something! It was just a super minor bug fix, but it feels good to know that some future build of VS Code may have some code I wrote in it. This also qualified me to get swag from Microsoft! I haven’t gotten any open source-related swag since the dearly-departed Adobe Flex shirt from 2008 (RIP Adobe Flex).

I’m only posting about this now, four months after the fact, because my Hacktoberfest swag only came in last week and I had to swing by the post office to pick them up. Here’s some pics:

I’m not really a stickers guy, so I’m not sure where I’ll put the stickers. Maybe they’d look good on my Macbook Air? I like the shirts though, since Americans have better shirt sizes from me than locally.

I’m still not “active” really on open source, but at least it was a nice first step. Maybe next October I’ll look for some bigger PRs to do!